👇As the theft of children from their families and the subsequent illegal adoption became a tactic of war, it also became a political market.
ANOTHER COUNTRY? Government Apologizes to Victims of Illegal Adoptions
By Jeff Abbott 7/22/2024
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo has taken an important step in seeking justice for tens of thousands of children illegally adopted from the Central American country.
On July 12, the president made a public apology to the parents of two children illegally adopted by a family in the United States in 1997. This is the first time that the Guatemalan government has made a public apology for illegal adoptions carried out in the country between 1977 and 2008.
The public apology was in response to the case of Osmín Tobar Ramírez, who was seven years old in 1997 when he and his younger brother, Jeffrey Arias Ramírez, who was nearly two years old, were taken from their family by the Guatemalan state and housed in the Asociación Los Niños de Guatemala orphanage. They were put up for adoption, an act that would later be revealed to be illegal.
“It was something sensational,” Gustavo Tobar, their biological father, tells The Progressive. “I never thought I would be in front of the highest authorities of the country, in an act especially dedicated to us. You feel a positive energy, you feel nervous, you feel everything, but it is something wonderful, it is something very wonderful.”
In 2018, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Osmín and Jeffrey’s parents after years of searching for the children and struggling to find justice in Guatemala, where their complaints were met with disinterest from authorities. The court ruled that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights of the family and that a criminal network had financially benefited from the trafficking of the brothers through adoption, ordering that the Guatemalan government apologize to them and set up a commission to find the children that were sold as part of the illegal adoption scheme.
“We sought justice here in Guatemala,” Tobar says. “We went to courts [in Guatemala], but they did not want to touch the issues. So we had to find an international court so that they could be heard. Everything seemed very long.”
He adds, “But thanks to God, after twenty-seven years we had that glimmer of hope, that the government of Guatemala would apologize for all the atrocities that were committed against us.”
Osmín and his brother were taken by the state and adopted out during the darkest days of Guatemala’s internal armed conflict, when criminal networks would steal children and put them up for adoption. Arévalo’s public apology comes as a welcome shift for those who have been seeking justice for decades.
“It was a historic step after a long struggle,” Mariela SR Coline Fanon, the President of the Lost Roots Foundation and who herself was illegally adopted from Guatemala in the 1980s, tells The Progressive.
“The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued this sentence before the state because really the apologies were one with an international sentence that the state of Guatemala should comply with the order,” she explains. “It opens the door for everyone. It is a first step.”
Between 1977 and 2008, Guatemala became one of the primary countries in the world for illegal adoptions, just ahead of Russia and China. During those years there were an estimated 30,000 cases of children being illegally adopted from the Central American country before international adoptions were made illegal in 2008. Each adoption cost between $12,000 and $80,000.
Many of the people involved with the illegal adoption scheme were directly connected to Guatemalan political and business leaders, meaning these crimes have largely gone unpunished and families have remained separated.
“Impunity cannot be the only response to what happened,” Fanon says. After discovering her story at age thirty, she wrote a book entitled Mamá, No Estoy Muerta (Mom, I Am Not Dead) that documents her own kidnapping, adoption, quest for justice, and meeting her biological mother.
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